May 8th, 2014

Before Calagator, Portland discovered events through Upcoming — and now we’re going to have it again

Early in the days of this most recent reboot of the Portland startup scene. We were all trying to figure out who was doing what. And what we could be doing. And how Portland could work together. And nothing was better at getting people together during those early days than a little site called Upcoming.

Upcoming had already been acquired by Yahoo! at that point. But it still served us well. It was an amazing and simple means of connecting likeminded folks. And getting us together for events like BarCamp Portland and Beer and Blog and user groups and all sorts of other stuff.

So it was a sad day when Yahoo! started to muck with Upcoming—or maybe more accurately, let it fall into disrepair. It lost its luster. And folks started to migrate to other services.

And then things got even more sad when Yahoo! shut down the service all together.

There, there, gentle reader. Don’t fret. Wipe away that tear. This story has a happy ending.

You see, Portland’s Andy Baio—the original creator of Upcoming—recently received an offer to regain the Upcoming URL from Yahoo! As such, he’s going to rebuild the service with the same ethos as the original offering.

Like many of the people that used it, I miss Upcoming. Nothing’s come to replace it in the years since, and I have the same problems that motivated me to build it a decade ago—I’m missing interesting events in my city and struggling to discover interesting events when I travel. I don’t know what my friends are going to, and I lose track of the events I hear about on a regular basis.

I want to bring back Upcoming, rebuilding it for the modern era using tools and platforms that weren’t available at the time I started it. I started Upcoming long before Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, or OAuth.

And I’d love to restore the original Upcoming events collected by Archive Team to a permanent archive, hosted at their original URLs. There’s over 35TB of raw HTML, Javascript, and images in their data dump, which I plan to parse and release as structured data.

The project will be funded. It successfully met its goal in less than two hours. So, Andy will be getting to work on the project.